There are opposing factors that influence population growth rates. Pronatalist pressures increase desire to have children while birth reduction pressures in developed countries, like higher education and women's freedom, result in fewer children. Most countries experience a demographic transition as development improves living conditions and death rates fall faster than birth rates. Some experts believe this transition will lead world population to stabilize in the 21st century, while others warn many poor countries may be trapped in high population growth due to resource shortages preventing development. Ensuring social justice, women's empowerment, child survival and access to family planning are key to successfully slowing growth rates.

1. POPULATION GROWTH:
OPPOSING FACTORS

2. Pronatalist Pressure
It is a factor that
increases people’s desire
to have babies.

3. Birth Reduction Pressure
In more highly developed countries, many pressures
tend to reduce fertility. Higher education and
personal freedom for women often result in
decisions to limit childbearing. A desire to spend
time and money on other goods and activities
offsets the desire to have children.

4. Demographic Transition
 In 1945 demographer FRANK NOTESTEIN pointed
out that a typical pattern of falling death rates and
birth rates due to improved living conditions usually
accompanies economic development. He called this
Demographic Transition from high birth and death
rates to lower birth and death rates.

5. Development and Population
Food storages, malnutrition, lack of sanitation and
medicine, accidents and other hazards generally
keep death rates in such a society around 30 per
1000 people. Birth rates are correspondingly high to
keep population densities relatively constant. As
economic development brings better jobs, medical
care, sanitation and a generally improved standards
of living, death rates often fall very rapidly.

6. Optimistic View
Some demographers claim that a demographic
transition already is in progress in most developing
nations. They believe that problems in taking
censuses and a normal lag between falling death
and birth rates may hide this for a time but that the
world population should stabilize someone in the
twenty first century.

7. Population
Growing prosperity and social reforms that
accompany development reduce the need and
desire for large families in most countries.
Technology is available to bring advances to the
developing world much more rapidly than was the
case a century ago, and the rate of technology
exchange is much faster than it was when Europe
and North America were developing.

8. Less- developed countries have historic pattern to
follow. They can benefit from the mistakes of more-
developed countries and chart a course to stability
relatively quickly.
Modern communications have cause a revolution
of rising expectations that acts as stimuli to spur
change and development.

9. Pessimistic View
Economist LESTER BROWN of The World Watch
Institute warns the many of the poorer countries of the
world appear to be caught in the “Demographic Trap”
that prevents them from escaping them from the
middle phase of demographic transition. Their
populations are now growing rapidly that human
demands exceed the sustainable of local forest,
grassland, crops land, and water resources. The
resulting resource shortage , environmental
deterioration, economic decline, political instability may
prevent these countries from ever completing
modernization. Their populations may continue to
grow until catastrophe intervene.

10. A Social Justice View
A third view is that social justice is the real key to
successful demographic transitions. The world has
enough resources for everyone, in this view, but
inequitable social and economic systems cause
misdistribution of those resources. hunger, poverty,
violence, environmental degradation, and
overpopulation are symptoms of a lack justice,
rather than a lack resources.

11. Infant Mortality and Women’s Right
The 1994 International Conference on Population and
Development in Cairo, Egypt, signalled a new
approach to population issues. A broad consensus
reached by the 180 participating countries agreed that
responsible economic development, education and
empowerment of women, and high-quality health
care must be accessible to everyone if population
growth is to be slowed. Child survival is one of the
most critical factors in stabilizing population. When
child and mortality rates are high as they are in much
of the developing world, parents tend to have high
numbers of children to ensure that someone will
survive adulthood.

12. Better nutrition, improved health care and
immunization against infectious diseases have
dramatically reduced child mortality rates, which have
been accompanied in most regions by falling
birthrates. Estimates indicate that saving 5 million
children each year from easily preventable
communicable diseases would avoid 20 or 30 extra
births.

13. The Future of Human Population
When we reached the equilibrium, the total number
of humans is likely to be somewhere around 8 to 10
billion depending on the success of family planning
programs and a multitude of other factors affecting
human populations.

14. Successful family planning programs often require
significant societal changes. (1) improve social,
educational, and economic status for women. (2)
;improved status for children (3) ;acceptance of
calculated choice as a valid element in life in
general and in fertility in particular;(4) social
security and political stability that give people the
means and the confidence to plan for future;(5) the
knowledge, available and use of effective and
acceptable birth control.